LLED 360

I find the distinction between oral and visual vocabulary an interesting one, the loss of translation between seeing and hearing a word is a phenomenon that, I speculate, has happened to many of us.  For example I learned the word ethereal purely through text and for years pronounced it as “ur-e-thral” until a friend corrected me.

Since English is a language made of strange amalgamations of different conquering countries, developing from Latin roots, later being invaded and colonized by North Germanic and Norman French tribes, there are some grammatical nuances that make little sense to a newcomer to the language.  For example one might question why cow turns into beef, pig to pork, and chicken to…chicken?  I had a co-worker who was a non-native English speaker that once asked me why the plural of sheep wasn’t sheeps.  I still don’t think I am capable of answering that question.  Learning the rules of the language is especially complicated because of the many ‘exceptions to the rule’ that make up the language.

In my experience, the point the article makes about poorer readers falling farther behind and stronger readers excelling at a quicker rate rings true.  Learning new vocabulary is like equipping yourself with building blocks that grow and stack upon one another.  As the reading grow more and more complex, those who have the initial foundation can continue to construct and acquire new vocabulary.  However if these gaps are already present there is no platform to build upon, new vocabulary often slips and falls away, disregarded and ignored.  This can be an extremely exasperating process for the English language learner.  One of the standard expressions of this frustration I’ve heard are things like “why can’t you say it simpler?” and “what is the point of using big complicated words I can’t understand when you could use smaller ones?”

What are some of the tools we can use to effectively teach things like grammar and vocabulary besides demanding straight memorization of the rules and all the idiosyncrasies that accompany them?  It seems as if an effect way for students to make sense of such things as homophones (e.g. batter, rose) and homographs (e.g. desert) is to provide a lot of exposure of these words in their context.  Simply explaining why rose means a perennial flower as well as the past tense of rise would is a difficult task without seeing them properly situated in a sentence.

I remember doing assignments with an Oxford’s English dictionary by my side which was incredibly time consuming.  One of the great benefits of living in this software age is the convenience of the tools that come with it.  I was impressed by the article’s suggestion about putting hyperlinks into text.  I can’t think of a more convenient way to access new vocabulary while seeing it in use.  Perhaps utilizing new technologies such as these would be an effective way to engage students in new vocabularies.